I am a VP/Principal Architect for Cloud Technology Partners. I was the CTO for MDot Network, which won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge and am the author of "Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)".

Complexity Will Drive Demand For Managed Services Providers

Technology has changed a lot over the years. Back in the mainframe days we had very standard architectures that were driven by a few vendors and managed by a few people. Developers had few choices when it came to infrastructure and programming languages. When we moved to the client server era, infrastructure configurations became much more dynamic and many enterprises adopted a three tier architecture. Developers could now choose from a variety of programming languages and specialists emerged within each layer of the architecture (web, application, database, middleware, etc.). This increase in complexity came with trade-offs. We now had greater flexibility in the types of applications we could build and the ability to deliver software with more velocity and at a lower cost. However, managing these n-tier architectures created more operational overhead and required a diverse set of skills to support the various layers.

As we enter the cloud era, complexity is at an all-time high and our trade-offs are more extreme than ever before. We can build incredible solutions at amazing scale. Both the software and infrastructure components of our architectures can be highly automated. We live in the world where everything can be delivered as a service and is available online, all the time. In order to support the “always on” and auto scaling requirements that users have come to expect, the underlying architectures have become extremely complex.

Balancing agility and complexity

At the same time our architectures are increasing in complexity, the business is demanding speed to market like never before. Large ecosystems around cloud computing, mobile computing, big data solutions and the Internet of Things allow us to connect highly abstracted building blocks together and build highly available and extremely robust solutions in a fraction of the time. The architectures of cloud, mobile, and big data are highly distributed and the underlying infrastructure is both virtual and immutable. That is a radical change from when previously large, inflexible, physical architectures supported the software we built.

Today’s distributed architectures are made up of many moving parts. These architectures are elastic, meaning that they scale up and down horizontally by adding and subtracting virtual resources automatically. Building architectures of this nature is much more involved than in the vertical scaling world of mainframes and client server architectures where scaling meant adding bigger physical machines and components. Many engineers within today’s enterprises have years of experience dealing with vertical architectures, but very little experience in building horizontal architectures. Enterprises are traditionally very good at managing back office applications and building n-tier software. But when it comes to architectures that require high scalability and massively parallel processing, very few enterprises have the experience required to build those types of applications.

This creates the following dilemma. The business sees an opportunity, whether it is a new revenue stream, a competitive advantage, or possibly a competitive threat, and requests that IT implements a new cloud, mobile, or big data solution. IT has very little expertise in this space yet still decides to build it themselves. They go through a long period of prototyping and learning. Many of these enterprises will fail to deliver or will deliver something subpar or very late. While IT is trying to wrap their arms around these new technologies, the business opportunity sits there idle and the opportunity costs start accumulating rapidly over time. To make matters worse, IT is spinning their wheels and consuming valuable time and money just to stand up clouds, mobile platforms, or big data databases before they can even begin to focus on building the applications and services that will provide the greatest value to the business. Much of the work that IT is trying to figure out is already a commodity that a whole host of vendors already provide out of the box as a service, or even as a completely managed service.

Giving up control to acquire value

IT traditionally wants to be in control of everything. Developers frequently want to build many things that are not a core competency. The problem I see in IT is they prioritize things like control and manageability far more than things like speed to market, customer satisfaction, agility, etc. We live in an era where time to market is one of the most critical value propositions in business. Get something to market quick, acquire customers, learn from those customers, and advance the product or service based on customer feedback. Going dark for 12-18 months as IT ramps up its skillset for the new technologies is not a winning formula. IT needs to understand that they should focus on delivering business value instead of trying to control every technology under the sun.

Where does IT add value?

The real value of IT is its deep understanding of the business and enabling business partners by providing them with cost effective technology solutions that can be delivered quickly and adjusted frequently. Building and managing commodity technologies adds time and costs to each project and ties up precious IT resources on tasks that add little to no value to the business. No wonder IT is often considered a cost center! My advice is to take a step back and build a business architecture diagram that lays out the core business services that your company offers. Then draw up a reference architecture that depicts all of the different IT services that are required to support those business services. Then, identify which of those IT services are core to your business and build those. Everything else should be outsourced to managed service providers or to various external services and products.

Summary

IT needs to stop being a control freak and figure out how to add value by quickly delivering on the company’s core services. IT should be focusing on being the best provider of the services that their customers demand. If that service happens to be providing data center services, then by all means focus on that. If not, don’t spend time building datacenters. The same goes for big data, mobile, and IoT. If the company’s core service is to be a provider of database services, mobile platforms, or sensor technology, then build those technologies. If not, find the vendors who deliver those services as a core competency and spend your time building your business services on top of it.

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Great article! Your point that IT wants to be in control is right on the money. The flip side, however, are CMOs and other executives who can’t wait for IT or who are fed up with the CIO’s need for control and who end up going around IT for their Digital Transformation initiatives. That route has substantial pitfalls once companies find they must leverage their systems of record in their Digital initiatives.

The key to addressing these issues is, as you point out, architecture. But even there pitfalls abound. Too many organizations get the architecture wrong — leading to wasted money and giving architecture a bad reputation. Rising above this challenge and getting the architecture right is half the battle.

Great post! Another factor weighing into the equation here will be the ability of executives to actually understand the output of IoT and Big Data initiatives. I’m not convinced that most business leaders have the skills necessary to apply data strategically in decision making. How can we address this?

Amazing the complexity that gets added EVERY DAY. Not only in the technology, but also the people and the work they do. 5 years ago, DevOps was almost unheard of.

Cloud came about because IT could not respond to the needs of the business fast enough. So, the Web Developer that could punch out a web site for a marketing campaign on a Cloud Service became the go to person for the biz.

The conundrum is this: When something goes wrong, who do they call? Who handles the urinary olympics and finger pointing – Its the network – its the database – its the server – its the application… ? The CMO doesn’t really care who’s problem it is. What they are concerned about is that their campaign is turning sour.

Part of the problem with the assumption of responsibility for detecting, isolating, and responding to problems is that IT organizations are event bombed DAILY. They may have 2-3000 active events every day. Yet they have a half dozen folks or less trying to decipher the issues, test and respond to those, and returning the services back to full operation. The technology that was OK 10 years ago is just not cutting the muster. The agility and movement that occurs way too quickly for management apps and CMDBs to keep up.

The CIO still wants control. And I don’t blame him. When problems arise, they are the one who will be called on the carpet. Why couldn’t IT provide for Marketing? Why didn’t they see and respond to the problem?

Interesting part is that we are solving this every day at Moogsoft. There are instances where Incident.Moog has received in excess of 20000 events and reduced that to 3 SITUATIONS. And we engage collaboration in focused competencies so that folks that are not involved don’t need to be in the Situation Room. If you can recognize the situation and work through things in a collaborative, team oriented manner, the CMO gets what he/she wants and the CIO gets what he/she wants.

Very well written and useful article. I’d take this a step further and a bit differently – the right single/core approach for internal IT is not only: “… how to add value by quickly delivering on the company’s core services.” nor is it only that “IT should be focusing on being the best provider of the services that their customers demand.”

In fact, a company’s “core services or services that their customers demand” are increasingly and more often able to be solved with managed services. So, it really isn’t about either of these first two specific points, fundamentally.

What a company’s IT should be focused on is technology enabling the company’s core differentiators in their market(s). To this end, the intrinsic business knowledge/strategic competencies (of IT) can be best focused and brought home to enabling the business strategy. This is accomplished by a pervasive focus on these core differentiators needed for success within the company’s business strategy, whether by IT or with hybrid managed services components technology delivery model.

I think this point is where the dovetail (back to your points) into having a sound business architecture enabled by a technology architecture completes the picture.